Students had targeted teachers in past too

The gruesome murder of Chennai school teacher Uma Maheshwari inside the classroom by her ninth standard student on Thursday has forced civil society to sit up and once again debate the pedagogical skills adopted by teachers and the effect on children’s psyche.However, contrary to general perception, this is not the first time Tamil Nadu has witnessed violent crimes committed by students against their teachers.Students have in the past vented their anger on teachers in different forms, including orchestrating murderous attacks.Old timers recall two major cases in Chennai which had shocked the teaching fraternity in the mid-nineties.  In the first case, the headmaster of a Government-aided school in T Nagar suffered an acid attack for admonishing a back-bencher in the class. The boy decided to take revenge and approached a school dropout for help. The duo threw acid on the headmaster as he walked on the road.It was not an impulsive attack, as police found out. The school dropout, had tried out the acid on a  dog before targeting the headmaster.During 1995-96, Professor Raghavan, principal of the Pachaiyappa’s College in Chennai earned the ire of a student who was caught copying in an exam. Angered, the student hurled a bottle of acid on Raghavan’s face when the latter was returning home.The professor lost an eye and his face was disfigured. “Ironically, his assailant is now free although he was initially detained under the Goondas Act. He managed to come out using political connections,” recalled a professor.Back in the eighties, students resorted to harmless pranks to discomfort a teacher whom they disliked. “Usually, the back-benchers punctured the tyres of the teacher’s moped or opened the fuel tank and dumped sugar or sand into it when no one was looking,” said Kesavan, a teacher in a private school in Vellore.